When people view long-form video on an on-demand cable platform, they tend to watch a greater percentage of the longer creative executions. That's the conclusion of an Atlas Digital Marketing Insight study that's expected to be released today. ...

... The new party line says Google and Yahoo are cable's real competition in video, not Verizon and AT&T. Then there's the growing cadre of Internet video upstarts like Akimbo, YouTube, and DaveTV. ¶ The upstart crowd is doing a nice job of assembling "viral" and user-generated content. But distribution is limited to the PC screen, or in Akimbo's case, a proprietary IP set-top box. Couldn't they team with MSOs? ¶ Of course, cable MSOs can add value to these services by providing preferential QoS treatment for video streams. But what proves far more interesting is moving these "long tail" services into cable's video-on-demand (VOD) offerings. In this model, YouTube and friends would essentially become cable programming networks -- Homey Box Office if you will -- aggregating and filtering user-generated video content for on-demand broadcast to the TV. ...

... with the spread of high speed broadband there is an increasing possibility that you just might find a whole TV channel, not just on the internet, but through your TV and mobile too. ¶ English village cricket in the heart of Oxfordshire is not the sort of thing you would expect to find on TV. ¶ BBC Sports Correspondent Rob Bonnet, a familiar face to millions, presents match highlights but this is not the BBC. ...

The Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006, which has been best known as one of the battlegrounds for network neutrality, is coming up for a vote today in the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation. In addition to granting the phone companies a so-called nationwide franchise to offer TV programming over their networks and a handful of other revisions to the law, an amendment that revives the video and audio broadcast flag has returned in all of its glory ...

Reviews are starting to trickle in from those early adopters lucky (?)
enough to get their grubby mitts on the first Blu-ray player, the
Samsung BD-P1000, ahead of its official launch on June 25. The question
on everyone's mind is: now that I've just dropped US$1,000 on a movie
player, have I at last scaled the heights of cinematic bliss? The
answer is a conclusive "maybe." ...

Saturday, 24 June 2006

I've been seeing more and more Alexa web traffic graphs inserted in various blog postings, so thought I'd play with it. The graph inserted here compares NPR.org (Alexa rank 1,197) with PBS.org (Alexa rank 1,077) for the past 12 months. In the broadcast world, NPR stations have roughly four times more listening per user than PBS stations have viewing per user, giving public radio double the contact hours per year. On the other hand, public television's cumulative (sampling) usage is roughly triple that of public radio's. Alexa's daily reach statistic is a cumulative metric, so the fact that they're this close probably says something about public radio's audience being more webcentric than public television's audience. Also, it's interesting to see how episodic PBS.org is over time -- apparently program-driven.

For a local station comparison, here's a graph comparing the two major public stations in New York, WNET-TV (Alexa rank 68,256) and WNYC-FM (Alexa Rank 30,389).

Click images to enlarge.

Update 9:35p Pacific Time. Be sure to read Bob Lyons' methodology comment below. Alexa's metrics come from monitoring attention from users (all using Internet Explorer) of its toolbar. The company has a page describing its methodology from which comes the following quote:

... the Alexa user base is only a sample of the Internet population, and sites with
relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa due to the
statistical limitations of the sample. Alexa's data come from a large sample of
several million Alexa Toolbar users; however, this is not large enough to
accurately determine the rankings of sites with fewer than roughly 1,000 total
monthly visitors. Generally, Traffic Rankings of 100,000+ should be regarded as
not reliable because the amount of data we receive is not statistically
significant. Conversely, the more traffic a site receives (the closer it gets to
the number 1 position), the more reliable its Traffic Ranking becomes.

Cara Lane has published an evaluation of the use of podcasting at the University of Washington. We had similar results in a limited test at Washington State University. To me, one of the most striking findings was that, even though 63% of the students reported owning an iPod or other MP3 player, only 14% used the podcasts on a player (and four out of five of the 14% were using the MP3 player in a location that had access to a computer). 86% of the students used the podcasts on a computer. Sure makes one wonder if podcasting is the right label. [Click graphic for larger image.] --Dennis

Giving priority to some traffic puts a hurt on other types of traffic and when that other traffic constitutes more than 30 percent of the Internet, the results can be severe for all of us. On the Internet everything is connected, and you can't easily ignore the impact of one service on another.